by Wong, Allen
By having less competition and challenge in high school, I had more free time to learn other things. After I had mastered HTML during my freshmen year, I moved onto learning Flash. Back then, all of the cool websites had Flash in it. It’s a bit archaic now to have Flash on your website, but it was the fad of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. The ability to add more interactivity to your website that normal HTML and JavaScript couldn’t do was what fascinated me the most. This fascination ultimately led me to develop apps, where good interactivity was one of the main selling points.
During my junior year, my high school started offering C++ classes. It was a very basic class that taught me the fundamentals of programming. It was in that class that I found out that I had a talent for programming. I learned C++ at a much faster pace than everyone else did. While my memory skills were not excellent, my logic, critical thinking, creativity and mathematical skills made up for it. All of those were essential to learning how to program code.
I aced every exam given in that class, and I also did all of the extra credit work. I didn’t have to, but I wanted the challenge anyway. I eventually got bored with how slow the class was going, so I skipped several chapters ahead. Once I finished with the entire textbook, I decided to have some fun in the class, because there were still some months left in the semester.
Lifehack #13: Don’t boast. You can trust no one.
The computers with the Windows 95 operating system that my C++ class had were easily hacked. I played pranks on the other students by modifying their Windows splash screen to show random pictures of celebrities. I had written a batch file that would automate the entire process. All I had to do was put in the floppy disk with my hack, and run the autoexec.bat file. The whole hack took less than a few seconds. So when the class started or finished, I’d put the hack in before the students took their seats. Since the teacher had no idea how to change the splash screen back, I was able to infect several computers with my prank before they were all changed back.
The one mistake I had was that I had the stupid idea of attaching my alias to the images. I wanted credit for my work, just like how graffiti artists wrote their name on their work. Eventually, someone recognized my alias and snitched on me to the C.S. teacher.
The teacher confronted me after class was over and said, “Someone told me that you were the one behind this. I don’t care if you did or didn’t do it. Just change it back, and I will not tell the dean about this.”
Later that week, I snuck into the empty computer room during a bathroom break in another class. I changed it all back while making sure that nobody was looking. The teacher kept his promise and never told the dean about it. But I later learned that my prank did not go unpunished.
When you apply to college, you have the option to select one school for an early-decision application. This meant that you promised to attend the school if they accepted you. The idea was that if you were on the borderline of being accepted, the school would accept you if they saw that you were an early-decision applicant. Colleges don’t like their acceptance letters to be rejected, so they prefer early-decision applications.
I applied to an Ivy League school as my early-decision college choice. But, my application was marked incomplete because one of my two recommendation letters was not received by the school. When I asked around, I found out that it was my C.S. teacher’s recommendation letter that was never sent out. I only chose him to write my recommendation, because I was applying to the school as a computer science major. I had other teachers as back-up if he didn’t want to do it. But he promised that he would do it, so I trusted him.
That ultimately screwed me over, because he either forgot to do it, or he was punishing me for the prank I pulled. To this day, I still don’t know why he didn’t mail that recommendation letter in time. Either way, his letter must not have been that great, because when I reapplied as a normal applicant a month later, I was wait-listed. And for every school that didn’t require a recommendation letter, I was accepted.
Perhaps it was for the best that I didn’t end up in that Ivy League school. I saved tens of thousands of dollars in tuition by attending a public school instead of an Ivy League school. Also, by having a less challenging workload at my non-Ivy League school, I was able to do a lot of self-education on the side.
Lifehack #14: Take advantage of free education.
After my C++ class, I wanted to use my newfound skills in the real world. So I found a summer internship that was being offered to just one candidate at a tech company in Manhattan. The company focused on creating Java-based web solutions and IT consulting for different small business and corporate clients. Their biggest client was for a pharmaceutical corporation that created a famous allergy medicine. It seemed like a company that would help me get a foot in the door, so I applied for the internship.
During the interview, various employees and even the CEO of company interviewed me. The CEO said that I showed promise because of my high SAT scores and because of my perfect grade in my computer science class. But the problem he had with me was that I only knew how to code in C++ when the job requirement was for Java, a similar, but different programming language. So he told me to reapply when I knew how to code in Java.
I took him up on the offer and quickly went to the library after the interview was over. At the library, I borrowed a book that taught the basics of Java. I started reading it as though I had an exam on the matter the next day. After reading the book for many hours straight, I decided that I knew enough about Java to reapply for the job. So I called up the CEO of the company the next day and told him that I learned Java and would like a second chance at the internship. He was curious, so he granted me that second chance.
During the second interview, they asked me a few basic questions about Java, and I knew the answers. However, as the interview went on, the questions got more advanced, and I didn’t know the answers. I tried to answer them in the best way that I could, but they weren’t the right answers.
After the interview was over, the CEO said, “You didn’t answer all of the interview questions correctly. Next time, just say that you don’t know the answer instead of giving a bad answer. It’s okay to not know the answers sometimes. What intrigued me the most about you was that I told you to come back when you knew Java, and you actually went out and tried to learn Java. You didn’t wait a year or a month or even a week to start learning. You went out and tried it immediately. You may not be the best Java coder we interviewed, but you definitely have the attitude that I would like to see in my employees. I’m going to accept you for the internship. But I want you to review those Java books some more.”
And that was when I got my first job at a tech company.
The learning curve at the company was very steep. I had to learn new technologies, such as Apache, SOAP, REST, Java, Linux, JavaScript, UNIX, and VI, at the internship. Since the other employees were busy with their own work, they only told me what to learn without actually teaching me anything. I had to learn everything on my own.
It was all overwhelming at first, but the challenge of it all was what kept me pushing to learn more. I was basically learning college level material while I was interning there. One of the employees told me that spending a month there was equal to spending a semester in college.
All of the technologies I learned at the internship would later prove useful when I had a web development course in college, and when I was interviewed for tech jobs. Although the steep learning curve would have deterred most people from wanting to move forward and learn more, it ultimately benefited me. I stood out during my college applications and during my job interviews.
One of the major differences between humans and animals is that we can share knowledge easily and learn things faster than animals can. Why should we throw this talent away? Educate yourself beyond what is expected of you, and you will be rewarded in the long run.
“Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our pote
ntial.”
– Winston Churchill
8
Ugly World
From all of the bullies and gangsters at my school, I already knew how ugly the world was out there. It was pretty much a dog eat dog world. It seemed like almost every day there was someone trying to scam you.
I was even scammed by an older classmate when I was in the first grade. Back then, I used to make and sell paper ninja stars for a dime each. None of my classmates knew how to make them, but they thought the ninja stars were the coolest things they’ve ever seen. One day, a classmate who was a year older than us told me that he would pay 50 cents for each of my ninja stars. But he said that I’d have to let him try out my paper ninja stars at home first before he would pay me the next day. So he took my whole box of a dozen or so ninja stars with him home. He ended up never paying for them. When I asked him about the money, he would always find an excuse to explain why he didn’t have it. I trusted him, because I was gullible at that age. My brother had to explain to me later on that I’d just been scammed.
And when I got on the internet, there were even more scams. I had my first major experience with an online scam back when I was a teenager. It involved a web-based game called Neopets®.
One of the biggest crazes during my time in high school was online multiplayer games. Neopets became very popular at my school. You basically control a virtual pet, and you must play Flash games to gain money to buy food and clothes for your pet. There was even a store interface that you could set up to sell your in-game items for in-game currency. It was through these customizable stores that people were scamming victims.
Lifehack #15: Use social engineering to get what you want.
The creators of Neopets were ignorant enough to allow HTML tags for your store. They even allowed you to add custom cascading style-sheets (CSS). So scammers of the game would sell high-valued items at low prices to attract unsuspecting victims to their Neopets store. But they also hid their actual store using CSS, and created a fake store made out of HTML. If you clicked on the fake store item in an attempt to try to buy it, you were taken to an external website that resembled the login page for the Neopets website. After the victim enters his username and password into the fake login page, the scammer can use that info to log into the victim’s account.
The whole setup is what computer security professionals called ‘Phishing’. It is a play on the word ‘fishing’, because the whole setup resembles a person laying out bait and fishing for what he wants (and in this case, Neopets accounts). What the Neopets scammer would do next was log into the victim’s account, buy cheap items from his own account’s store at ridiculously high prices, and then create a fake shop for the victim’s account to reel in even more victims. This allowed the scammer to transfer a lot of in-game currency from the victim’s account to his own account. The whole setup could be repeated over and over again with increasingly higher success rates as more and more fake shops were being set up.
The hack was pretty interesting to me because it was more of a social engineering hack than a computer hack. It relied more on the hacker’s ability to deceive the human mind rather than his ability to find vulnerabilities in a programmer’s code. I studied this type of social engineering extensively and mastered it myself. The ability to convince a massive number of people to do what you want without them knowing that they are being manipulated proved to be quite useful later on. It was actually a lot like how chess players tried to convince their opponents to move their pieces in a certain way without them knowing that they were being influenced into doing so.
The 1% Rule
I never fell for these scams, but I learned that there were many naïve people out there who would. That gave me the confidence to believe that given a large enough sample size, there was bound to be someone who would do what you wanted him to do. I called it the 1% rule.
The 1% rule is simply my theory that about 1% or more of people in a large enough sample size will do exactly the opposite of what everyone else is doing. Take movie ratings for example. Even if a movie is universally praised by a majority of critics, there will always be a few reviews that say that the movie is horrible. And you can even see this 1% rule occur during the U.S. elections. While a majority of people vote for either Democrats or Republicans, there’s always that small percentage of people who votes for a third party. Even though the odds are very stacked against them for the third candidate to win the election, they still use their vote to vote for that third candidate.
App development tip #2: Position your ads carefully.
You can actually make money off of this rule. By placing banner advertisements in strategic locations on your website, you can get ad revenue when 1% of the people clicks on the banner advertisements.
The best location I found on a mobile website is a banner at the very top of the page. When I ran my company’s regoapps.com website with just a few banner ads at the bottom, the ad revenue was not that great. But when I added a banner to the very top, my ad revenue more than doubled. I verified this strategy when I made the same changes to the mobile website of a photo-sharing company that I co-owned. The changes doubled the ad revenue overnight.
On a mobile app, I found that the best location is at the very bottom of the app. Sometimes people need to reach the very top of their phone’s screen with their thumbs while they are holding their phone. The bulging flesh at the bottom of their thumbs tends to touch the bottom-right of the screen when they reach for the top of the screen with their thumb (or bottom-left corner if they are holding it with their left hand).
Another trick I learned to double the ad revenue on the mobile ads was to put a “close” or “hide” button on the top-right of the ad banner. You should not be covering the ad itself or else you’d be violating some ad network policies. But it should be small enough and close enough to the banner to cause users to accidentally tap the banner ads. But be careful when you use this method, as Google does not like it when their banner ads are tapped by accident. In fact, they would ban you or your company for life if there are too many accidental clicks to their banner ads. And if you try to appeal it, they will just give you a robotic answer denying your request for a second chance. That’s why I would avoid using Google’s ad networks if you want to employ this trick.
One of the other tricks I learned is to become an affiliate for iTunes®, Amazon® and other websites. For those who don’t know, affiliate marketing is where a company pays you commission for helping them sell their products. You can make extra revenue just by putting links to the company’s products on your website or app. As long as people are clicking on the link, there is bound to be a percentage of people who will then proceed to buy something. And for each sale, you earn a percent of the purchase price. I’ve been making a lot of money from the affiliate links that I put on my website and my apps, so I can tell you that it’s worth it. It’s not so much that it is giving me millions of dollars, but it’s a decent amount of money that will make it worth your while. That’s in stark contrast to zero affiliate revenue if I haven’t put those links in. And there is very little work in putting a link on your website or app.
Affiliate marketing is something that a lot of those “make money online” e-books teach you to do. However, there is not really much secret magic behind it, and it will not make you rich quickly (unless your website or app gets millions upon millions of visitor hits). Just do your research on where to sign up for affiliate links, and there, they will give you instructions on how to link to certain products with your affiliate link. So if your website is related to jazz music, you may want to link to some jazz songs. And if your website is related to apps, then you may want to link to some apps. This is what is called ‘targeted advertising’, because you’re giving your target audience certain advertisements based on what they enjoy. Even if you link to your apps on iTunes, you can earn commission off those sales. That way, you’d really be earning 75% of the sale instead of the usual 70% that Apple gives you
.
That’s pretty much all you need to know about affiliate marketing. A more detailed analysis on affiliate marketing could found by searching on your favorite search engine for more information. Keep in mind that most educational material can be found for free online these days, so dishing out money is not required. The people hawking those “get rich from working at home” e-books are really just making the majority of their income from the e-book sales, and not really from their affiliate marketing tricks. If a person has a good strategy, then that person would more likely spend his or her time trying to grow that method of making money instead of trying to share it with other people.
9
College
For college, I chose to attend UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and majored in Computer Science and Engineering. I had always wanted to live in Los Angeles after having been there for a few months when I was younger. The weather was great, the restaurants were world-renowned, and the people were laid back. The other top colleges were in the middle of nowhere, and just studying all day didn’t seem like my ideal college experience.
I’d also be lying if I said that the vast number of beautiful girls at UCLA wasn’t a major selling point for me and my hormonal self. My brother, who got his B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), told me that I shouldn’t expect to meet a lot of girls at CMU if I chose to go there. It was ranked as the number one computer science school, but the male to female ratio there was three to two. That wasn’t very appealing.
But besides the allure of attractive girls, UCLA was the birthplace of the internet and one of the top computer science schools in the world. Some of UCLA’s course material was taken straight from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s open-course material. So, the things that I was learning at UCLA were similar to the things I would have learned at M.I.T. I figured that if there was anything else I wanted to learn, I could have learned it on my own.